Review of Teaching Australian and New Zealand Literature, edited by Nicholas Birns, Nicole Moore and Sarah Shieff.

This collection is, at its best, like a conversation with colleagues
over a shared meal after a stimulating conference, something
all-too-often dreamed about and longed for but far too rarely
experienced. There are shared interests and enthusiasms to discuss;
ideas are circulating; suggestions and counter-claims mingle in an
unfussy and informal way. The strutters and big-noting boofheads have
headed elsewhere, off to the next keynote address, leaving behind more
modest, self-effacing, but serious company. These essays are shop-talk
of the best kind: twenty-seven scholars, all able to draw on wide
reading and their own research, offer insights from their own classroom
experiences and outlines for how the reader might bring Australian and
New Zealand literary material to life in stand-alone courses or as part
of more general literary studies programmes.

Frequently autobiograpical
and drawing on specific experiences of assigning and teaching Australian
material, the essays are no less intellectually rigorous and critically
stimulating for all that. Several, indeed, contain what feel like
impromptu close reading demonstrations, and Susan Sheridan’s ‘Portraits
of [Christina Stead] as a Young Woman’ (111) had me taking down The
Man Who Loved Children from the shelf with new thoughts for my
classroom next year. Wenche Ommundsen’s ‘Teaching Australian
Multicultural Literature’ (77) reads, on a first glance, as if it were
typed up in a spare hour between classes. But it takes decades of
reflection and steady professionalism, of course, to be able to treat a
subject so lightly, and Ommundsen is generous with her experience. The
‘main lesson’ she has ‘taken from teaching multicultural writing for
over twenty years’ is ‘not to contextualize a text out of existence’
(84), a nice example of the collection’s welcome focus on the literary
nature of Australian and New Zealand literature. Aimed at a North
American market and oriented to the graduate seminar room, there is much
in the collection that will also be of interest to English teachers
preparing students for the Year Twelve Higher School Certificate and its
equivalents in the Australian state systems.

Teaching Australian and New Zealand Literature is divided into five
parts. Part one, Histories and Contexts, is something of a grab-bag,
holding chapters on ‘colonial Australian print culture in the digital
age’; nineteenth-century writing from and about New Zealand; a
single-author study of Witi Ihimaera as an example of ‘teaching
international postcolonialism’; a chapter on ‘frontier fictions’; and
another, as mentioned, on ‘multicultural literature’. The reader may
fossick here productively, to be sure, but the assortment feels somewhat
random. Part two, on frequently taught authors, surveys the star
players: New Zealand representative writers are Katherine Mansfield,
Frank Sargeson, and Allen Curnow, while Team Australia is comprised of
Christina Stead, Patrick White, Les Murray, David Malouf and Kim Scott.

Elizabeth McMahon’s chapter, ‘Identity, Perversity, and Literary
Subjectivity: Teaching Patrick White’s The Twyborn Affair’ is
particularly satisfying. McMahon draws out the complexity of White’s
text and its different forms of narrative, sexual, and literary
‘disclosure’ (139) but is careful to link each of her readings to spurs
for classroom discussion. Melissa Kennedy’s survey of Witi Ihimaera’s
varied oeuvre is equally stimulating, and a good illustration of the
merits of its own case against ‘the trap of reading Indigenous fiction
as ethnographic truth or as thinly disguised politics’ (61). While
Kennedy explores the politics to Ihimaera’s works sensitively, his later
re-writings in particular, she also emphasises the complex,
contradictory, formally restless qualities of Ihimaera’s prose.

Part
three covers ‘global connections’, with reflections from Chadwick Allen
on teaching Māori and Aboriginal texts in global Indigenous contexts,
stand-alone chapters on Nam Le’s The Boat, Kate Grenville’s The
Secret River, Sally Morgan’s My Place and a more general set of
observations by Claire Jones on how ‘teaching from the postnational
space’ (223) might be a way of ‘liberating Australian literature’ (223).
Part four offers more practically-oriented course models, from general
guides to teaching ‘Aboriginal literature in the classroom’ (237), a
particularly welcome chapter by Jeanine Leane, to surveys of New Zealand
young adult fiction and Australasian crime fiction. Two single-author
studies in this section, Julieanne Lamond on Miles Franklin and Claire
Bazin on Janet Frame, sit somewhat awkwardly with their companions but
have insights of their own.

The final section provides links to
journals, blogs, and bibliographies in Australian and New Zealand
literary studies, and is least likely to be of interest to ALS
readers. The writing across all five parts is of a high standard: chatty
without being careless, straightforward without being simplistic,
learned and lucid. This is a pedagogical manual rather than a set of
critical studies and so, even if one is unlikely to turn to any of the
chapters here for readerly pleasure, they all offer the enjoyment of
professional spurs to new teaching.

If Teaching Australian and New Zealand Literature has the virtues of a
well-run conference, it shares some of that conference’s in-built vices.
We have all attended sessions with intriguing names lashing together an
incongruent group of presenters, and I wonder if ‘Australian and New
Zealand Literature’ might be doing that job here. The editors insist
that ‘cultural distinctiveness is far harder to find than it may have
been fifty years ago’ (3). I am not sure. Almost one-fifth of New
Zealanders live abroad, most of them in Australia, and yet close to
forty years of Closer Economic Relations has brought no real alignment
between the two literary cultures. Modernism happened differently in
both places, and Australia has no ‘problem’ (89) like Katherine
Mansfield in its literary history. Cultural nationalism, for that
matter, occupies a quite different decadal structure in each country’s
history, and New Zealand’s nationalist-modernist 1930s can be compared
more easily with Canada’s than with Australia’s. The greater visibility
of Pasifika cultures in New Zealand society (and literary publishing)
make for very different kinds of multiculturalism; Māori writing in
English is produced in an officially bilingual state and alongside a
revival of Māori language writing and expression. There are no courses
on Australian literature offered at any New Zealand university. Put more
crudely: no one reads Australian literature in New Zealand, and the
special New Zealand issues of Griffith Review (2014) and Overland
(2015) recently make me suspect the same must be true of New Zealand
literature in Australia. Chapters in the collection accordingly write
past each other. There is fine work on teaching Australian literature
and fine work on teaching New Zealand literature, but nothing really on
teaching Australian and New Zealand literature. The editors’ opening
lines about the two countries being ‘linked’ by ‘shared histories of
hope for cultural diversity and social equality’ (3) seems more
Obama-era North American good manners than any real connection. It is
not, at any rate, how I remember Frank the Poet describing Moreton Bay.

A more serious objection is to do with audience. For whom have these
essays been written? Maggie Nolan and Rebecca Weaver-Hightower tell us
that ‘anyone teaching an Australian novel at a university in the United
States can be confronted by students’ lack of knowledge about Australian
history and culture’ (202). The problem is not new, and Elizabeth Webby
opens The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature (2000) by
acknowledging a similar dilemma. Their recommended reading, Robert
Hughes’s The Fatal Shore and Stuart McIntyre’s Concise History of
Australia, contains implicit recognition that teachers as much as
students may lack some of the essential historical and social knowledge
needed to properly appreciate and engage with the ethical, political and
aesthetic achievement of Australian literature.

This uncertainty around audience produces occasionally frustrating
imprecisions. Some authors take the problem of knowledge as their main
subject, and Jeanine Leane and Chadwick Allen both offer practical
outlines of the difficulties involved in teaching Indigenous Australian
literature in non-Indigenous settings. The volume gives a ‘note on the
use of Maori’, explaining why the editors have not italicised Māori
words, a common enough feature of New Zealand scholarship. But then
current Māori orthography is not followed, and the missing macrons stand
metonymically for the volume’s general uncertainty. Other writers bat
the problem away, pointing to ways Australian texts can be connected to
pre-existing theoretical frameworks familiar to the North American
seminar room (Homi Bhabha is a frequent point of reference) or to
contemporary American cultural concerns.

I do not disagree with the
editors that ‘scholar-teachers working outside Australia and New Zealand
can generate new perspectives on this material, acknowledging the local
and specific while aspiring towards the transnational’ (3); the worry,
with a collection such as this, however, is that the ‘local and the
specific’ become seen as so many obstacles blocking the road towards the
‘transnational’, a space which can often seem suspiciously similar in
its intellectual furniture to the transit lounges of US thought. Who
would oppose transnationalism and world literature? Paul Sharrad had
some sceptical remarks to make in his chapter in Scenes of Reading: Is
Australian Literature a World Literature? (2013), and this volume
reinforces suspicions. The editors describe a critical division in which
‘transnational and transverse rubrics – genre, gender, style – are a
meaningful way to read Australian and New Zealand texts without either
working up or subscribing to essentialist nationalist definitions’ (6).
This surely is a furphy. What is the point of producing a volume on
Australian literature without thinking on the ways in which the
literature written in this political construct is shaped by its
particular history, difficulties, economics, and ideology? One need not
be a nationalist to see the need for some accounting for the nation. As
Claire Jones puts it in her chapter, ‘national and territorial borders
are political, not cultural or artistic … [but] by reading through and
outside borders we can create a more dynamic scholarly and readerly
space’ (224).

Thinking about this space must somehow, though, attend to both the act
of crossing and to the borders allowing ‘crossing’ itself to be thought.
Many contributors are, rightly, reluctant to repeat the reductive
gesture of ‘identifying … texts as generically postcolonial’ (248), but
what transnational criticism puts in this pedagogical place is something
still in formulation. Local attention need not mean restriction, either.
I agree with Rod McRae that Les Murray is a major poet, but when he
writes, straightforwardly enough, of ‘Murray’s push to refortify the
development of Australian national solidarity’ in ‘antielitist’ and
‘anticolonial’ (148) ways, he passes over a whole area for debate. The
intricacies of Quadrant’s Cold War history and the Culture and History
Wars may take some retelling, but they are hardly, in the era of Trump,
without resonance elsewhere.

Australia has, in politics if not literature, anticipated the United
States in horror and its normalisation. Mandatory detention, the
separation of parents from children, the flouting of international
conventions on refugees: wo Howard war, soll Trump werden. Australian
literature, in turn, has been obsessed by ethical and historical
questions paralleled in other settler colonies. Teaching Australian and
New Zealand Literature is a timely and welcome contribution, then,
offering the chance to think with Australian literature outside its own
borders. In an era of renewed nationalisms and self-congratulatory myths
across the white settler colonies, such border-crossing is pedagogically
and politically important. If the details of that ‘new postnational
space through which … literature can be projected’ (10) are not yet
fully clear, that may well be a symptom of our current
critical-political impasse as much as any weakness in this useful,
sturdy study.

Works cited

Sharrad, Paul. ‘Which World, and Why Do We Worry about it?’ Scenes of
Reading: Is Australian Literature a World Literature?, edited by Robert
Dixon and Brigid Rooney, Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2013, pp.
16–33.